Publications

Imitatio supports research, translation, and publication projects around the world. We seek publishing partnerships that increase the linguistic and geographic reach of the global conversation about René Girard's mimetic theory.

CURRENT PROJECTS:

MSU Press Book Series:Studies in Violence, Mimesis and Culture: Imitatio’s William Johnsen serves as Series Editor and with MSU publishes two to four books a year distributed in North America. The series includes English translations and original works.

Foreign Publishing Partnerships: Imitatio works with publishers around the world to make translations of key works widely available, for example by supporting the Biblioteca René Girard series of Portuguese translations by É Realizações in Brazil.

Selection of Imitatio Supported Titles

BATTLING TO THE END

René Girard's latest work engages the celebrated Prussian military theoretician who wrote the classic On War. A firsthand witness to the Napoleonic Wars, haunted by the Franco-German rivalry, Clausewitz clarifies more than anyone else the accelerating conflicts that would ravage Europe. Battling to the End pushes aside the taboo that prevents us from seeing that the Apocalypse has already begun. Human violence, escaping our control, today threatens the entire planet.

THE GENESIS OF DESIRE

Rivalry is at the heart of our attraction to one another. So argues University of Paris clinical psychopathologist Jean-Michel Oughourlian in The Genesis of Desire, where the war of the sexes is finally given a scientific explanation. How can a couple be saved when they have declared war on one another? By helping them realize that desire originates not in the self but in the other. This work, alternating between case studies and theory, convincingly defends the possibility that breakups need not be permanent.

Politics and Apocalypse

Apocalypse. To most, the word signifies destruction, the end of the world, but the literal definition is "revelation" or "unveiling," the basis from which renowned theologian René Girard builds his own view of Biblical apocalypse. In this volume, major thinkers about the interpretation of politics and religion— including Eric Voegelin, Leo Strauss, and Carl Schmitt— are scrutinized by some of today's most qualified scholars, all of whom are thoroughly versed in Girard’s groundbreaking work.

For René Girard

In his explorations of the relations between the sacred and violence, René Girard has hit upon the origin of culture — the way culture began, the way it continues to organize itself. The way communities of human beings structure themselves in a manner that is different from that of other species on the planet. Like Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Émile Durkheim, Martin Buber, or others who have changed the way we think in the humanities or in the human sciences, Girard has put forth a set of ideas that have altered our perceptions of the world in which we function. We will never be able to think the same way again about mimetic desire, about the scapegoat mechanism, and about the role of Jewish and Christian scripture in explaining sacriﬁce, violence, and the crises from which our culture has been born. The contributions fall into roughly four areas of interpretive work: religion and religious study; literary study; the philosophy of social science; and psychological studies. The essays presented here are offered as "essays" in the older French sense of attempts (essayer) or trials of ideas, as indeed Girard has tried out ideas with us. With a conscious echo of Montaigne, then, this hommage volume is titled Essays in Friendship and in Truth.

CHRISTIANITY, TRUTH, AND WEAKENING FAITH: A DIALOGUE

Christianity, Truth, and Weakening Faith moves beyond reductive debates about religion in secular societies through the collaboration of two major philosophers known for their progressive work on this issue. Seeking unity over difference, Gianni Vattimo and René Girard turn to Max Weber, Erich Auerbach, and Marcel Gauchet, among others, in their exploration of truth and liberty, relativism and faith, and the tensions of a world characterized by new forms of religiously-inspired violence. Vattimo and Girard reach the consensus that Christianity is "the religion of the exit from religion," and democracy, civil rights, the free market, and individual freedoms are all facilitated by Christian culture.

Girardiana

This book series, edited by Pierpaolo Antonello (U of Cambridge, UK) and Giuseppe Fornari (U of Bergamo, Italy), is the first series in Italy entirely devoted to René Girard's thought. It publishes texts by Girard not yet available in Italian, as well as critical and theoretical studies on the Mimetic Theory. Because of the interdisciplinary nature of Girard's thought, the series is open to a wide variety of disciplines, including anthropology, literary criticism, political science, theology, sociology, philosophy, and others.

The End of Violence: Analyses on the Fate of Mankind

The standard work, in German for the first time. René Girard examines the vicious cycle of retaliatory violence, revealing humans' imitative nature as the cause. Understanding imitation is the key for him - to cultural achievements as well as religious rituals and sacrificial rites. Imitation is also the way to curb violence. In his reinterpretation of the Judeo-Christian tradition, Girard shows that a conscious renunciation of violence and victims may be possible.